At 13, Germanotta wrote her first song. She began performing at open-microphone nights in coffeehouses soon thereafter. She was also cast in school musicals — mounted with a nearby all-boys school — most memorably the role of Adelaide in the classic Broadway musical Guys and Dolls.
Based on Damon Runyon’s stories of colorful Times Square characters in the prohibition era — gamblers, horseplayers, hustlers — Guys and Dolls captures a certain New York swagger and rhythm that lives on to this day, equal parts chutzpah and heart. Adelaide is a plum comic role, the disappointed-in-love nightclub singer who belts the plaintive “Adelaide’s Lament.” It’s easy to imagine young Germanotta bringing the audience to its feet.
Lady Gaga‘s public persona today holds traces of this Great White Way tradition of heart and verve.
Germanotta took acting seriously — she remained in character throughout the rehearsal process, insisting that her fellow actors call her Adelaide — and spent most Saturdays in acting class.
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Lesson: Focus is crucial to success. Germanotta never broke character because it would weaken her focus. Find concrete ways to strengthen and maintain your focus.”
—An excerpt from Gaga, Inc., out now on New Word Press. Photo: Giulio Pugliese
Stephen
It also helps to live in NYC, have your parents support you, and not have to work a minimum wage job while you try to get through school…
Kayo
@Stephen: We come to Earth with a predetermined path. Where we are born, and the circumstances of our family, and surroundings, are especially fitted to lead us to the path we are destined for. There’s a reason for everything.
NoelG
@Stephen: YOu don’t know her history. She dropped out of college after, at most, one year and struck out on her own. She didn’t accept money from her parents and worked three jobs to get by.
What you should have said is that she has a loving, supporting, stable family and that is probably where she got world view and her strength. She’s the proverbial glass-half-filled person in every aspect of her life.
James
@NoelG: You don’t know her either, you only know what she tells you. You fool. I bet you call “mother monster” like all the other sheep.
Stephen
Amen, James. I remember reading her dad put her up in her Apt while she “tried to make the music thing work”. What privilege.
Red Meat
@Stephen: I remember reading how Romney loves the gays.
Gayandcoolwithit
@redmeat what’s that gotta do with the gaga… @stephen never believe everythin u see or hear as not all things are just given to anyone in plain text
Chanmu1
Is there a point to this article. Writing that a kid stayed in character during her school production is a giant leap to Warren Buffet. Was Express Yourself playing in the background when you wrote this article?
Jasmine Glick
Gee, I thought Lady Xerox was all about NOT having money. As you can read her early interviews. Now the most fake, manufactured, Republican (she’s a Republican because she lies so easily) pop star shows off her 200,000 Audi and searches for a London home – just like Madonna! No Lady Lie Lie and her wealth are the product of her greedy managers, record label and the fact she already had connections to the recording industry through her NYC connected parents. The LGBT community needs to grow up and stop investing in pop stars like Gaga to be roll models for them. That’s for immature ten year olds who shop at Walmart and don’t understand the fakery of this pop music forger. We, the LGBT community, have grown past needing fake divas to be our play hero or be a roll model or lead a gay pride parade or white party – we have the millions of LGBT couples who are married or committed, raising children. Or the the new youthful teen and college age activists. Zach Wahls, Dan Savage and Rachel Maddow are real roll models. But not this lying, garish, one-note narcissist that the world has been swindled by.
Stephen
Replace “NYC” with corpus christi, and this would describe me in my teens. The difference? No connections in, no family support, etc… Nowhere to go in corpus christi. It’s hard for me to see her as a “self-made man” (pardon the gender switch) when it’s obvious she got lots and lots of help and was in a very lucky position to begin with.
Fred A.
@NoelG: Pure bull$hit – her people are loaded. She always lived well, with help. That ‘world view’ comment was pure garbage,..the ‘view’ is about money. Star types do not care how they get it, who gets hurt or corrupted,..as long as they have their $$$ and fame at the end of the day.